Ian Boyne, Contributor
IT'S PARADOXICAL but true: the poor is a powerful grouping - certainly in Jamaica. The poor, especially the militant, assertive urban poor, has exercised enormous influence over Jamaican politics and, indeed, civil society.
If you have any doubt about that and have the patience to weigh the evidence, there is an abundance of it in engrossingly delightful servings in Professor Obika Gray's enthralling new book, Demeaned But Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica, published by the University of the West Indies Press. This 424-page scholarly work bristles with challenging, insightful ideas and compellingly authenticates the thesis of this first-rate scholar that the Jamaican urban poor are anything but powerless.
Gray, a Jamaican professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, has written one of the finest social scientific works to have been published in this region for decades. That he received his first degree in journalism shows on every page: He commands an engaging, gripping style and there is no more readable scholarly work which I know of in this region.
The issue about which he writes is one that is deeply concerning to the entire country. We are still plagued with alarming levels of violence, gang warfare, turf war, struggle over 'donmanship' and the links between politics and criminality.
Wilmot Perkins might not have attended any university, but we are indebted to him at the popular level for having incessantly and sometimes annoyingly reminded us of the exploitation of the urban poor, particularly its criminal elements by the political class in pursuit of power.
Professor Obika Gray has now given scholarly justification to Perkins' views about the nexus between criminality and politics and the integral role played by criminal gangs and gang leaders in the evolution of Jamaican politics.
The book Demeaned but Empowered looks at some of Jamaica's illustrious dons and enforcers who have been aligned to the two main political parties. Gray traces the recruitment of the urban poor to do political dirty work to the 1940s, but more particularly to the 1960s in west and central Kingston.
URBAN POOR
Gray's work is much nuanced, reflecting his intellectual sophistication and wide reading. He demonstrates that it was not just a matter that the poor was being exploited and manipulated by the political class they were but the urban poor themselves were using the political class to gain legitimacy, to eke out a living and to create some social and economic space. Gray shows the ingenuity (or 'ginalship') of the poor, their inventiveness and creativity, sometimes crudely and crassly expressed.
Gray focuses on not just the urban poor per see but also on the element Marx called the 'Lumpen Proletariat': the class of almost unemployable, irredeemable (Omar Davies' term) social outcasts; the parasites, the roughnecks, the ragamuffin. These were (and are) the people most valuable to the politicians. They would do the dirtiest of work; they have no scruples, no socially-trained conscience, 'no little nutten bout dem'. The lumpen elements are the lowest of the low, the kind of persons you see hanging off the buses (and inside) on their way to political meetings and the ones bawling out, "Boss, do something fi mi nuh!" The ones who would create mayhem for a 'food money'.
URGES AND APPETITES
Gray quotes a column by Wilmot Perkins. "Their concern is only with their urges and appetites. When they are hungry they must eat. When they are angry they must destroy. When their bowels move they defecate (in public places) and when opportunity arises they loot. And politics, by giving them the vote, has given the best of all opportunities what they want is freeness. It is they who provide the driving force for entropy".
The urban poor have power. The politicians are afraid of them. All they have to do is to come out on the streets to demonstrate and to 'chuck badness' and the politicians quake in their boots and give in to their demands. When they illegally take over property for squatting successive governments find ways of legitimising them. When one understands the power of the poor, then it is not surprising that even the no-nonsense, determined and professional Richard Byles-led National Water Commission had to back down from its tough stance last week of cutting off water to certain communities because ostensibly the public defender has a legal problem with it. The poor are powerful.
Gray sees the 1972 election of the PNP's Michael Manley as crucial in highlighting the power of the urban poor.
"Although JLP activists and party leaders abetted this cultural invigoration in the slums, only with the PNP's ascension to power in 1972 did the norm of badness-honour secure the kind of legitimacy hitherto unseen in Jamaican politics. After 1972 badness-honour as a political etiquette and repertoire of power had been publicly embraced and given validation by the new Government".
PARTISAN POLITICS
According to Gray previous governments headed by Norman Manley in the 1950s and Hugh Shearer in the 1960s had bitterly denounced expressions of 'badness-honour' in the slums particularly when they were beyond the reach of partisan politics. But "the PNP's cultural orientation, political message and policy positions seemed to bless the norm of badness-honour in the slums as a politically appropriate response to social oppression".
Gray explains that, "like no political campaign before or since", the PNP's successful bid for power in the 1970s "identified the party with the lumpen proletariat".
It is not that the JLP leaders were angels. Indeed, Gray says things about Seaga in the book which any newspaper editor would be careful about repeating in print: But Gray shows how socialism ideologically favoured the lumpen elements which, incidentally, was quite contrary to the very negative stereotype of the lumpen proletariat given by Karl Marx, the founder of communism. It is not that Gray is opposed to left-wing ideas. Far from it.
But Gray does not exhibit the narrowness of some of the intellectuals at the UWI who have uncritically embraced all forms of the urban poor's rebelliousness and rejection of bourgeois norms. These intellectuals have failed to see how the ennui, normlessness and nihilism of the urban poor and the lumpen proletariat threaten the wider class of marginalised and oppressed persons. The anarchistic tendencies of the urban poor, its undirected, aimless rebelliousness do not serve the interests of the working class or civil society. What Demeaned but Empowered does is to bring a balance to the scholarship on the urban poor and the working class, giving us the kind of rigorous, surgical analysis which is the obligation of the thoroughgoing intellectual or scholar.
Gray wants to make it clear to the elite, though, that "given the intensity of popular social mobilisation and the militant poor's confrontational stance, it is clear that any proposal for reform and social renewal, from whatever source, must necessarily address the powerful grievances that led to these outburst and challenges".
RESOCIALISING THE URBAN POOR
It must be made clear that the rebelliousness of the poor, the rejection of middle class norms and values and the assertion of cultural independence, however raw or vulgar, are rooted in the class inequities, stratification, marginalisation and oppression which have been meted out to these persons.
Preaching 'values and attitudes' is not enough to bring about changes in the behaviour of the urban poor. The ruling class has created the type of decadent society which we have: We can't just blame the victims. Nor must we take the foolishly economistic view that all we need to do is to 'grow the economy'(JLP mantra), create more jobs, bring down interest rates and do all the right capitalist things and we will deal with the problems of Donmanship, criminal gangs and the crime factory in the inner-city. Gray dismisses the 'simplistic notions' that "employment is all that would be needed to reverse the dissenters' hostility to the state and society".
Gray also makes the important point which the Government and civil society must note: "The militant rebels' near-absolute and long-standing rejection of institutional forms of political power also suggests that proposals for social renewal that call for sacrifice, discipline and social restraint on the part of the alienated poor are likely to fail."
To me, the following is the most crucial thing to consider for any successor to PJ Patterson and Edward Seaga: "Building social consensus and rallying the alienated but socially powerful urban poor to a new project that can win their allegiance will be a major challenge for reformers".
There is a profound point which Gray makes about ragamuffin which is sometimes lost on its middle class critics: Ragamuffin is not totally dissimilar to the middle and upper classes in values. What the urban poor and ragamuffin share with the rest of society is "the intense individualism as well as a self-seeking and status-consciousness preoccupation with consumer materialism as measures of achievement and social recognition."
SHARED TRADITIONS
Thus, contrary to the widely-held view that the social actions and moral sensibility of the rebellious poor are outside the pale of Jamaican culture, these shared traditions show that the rebellious poor ought not to be regarded as moral aberrations inflected upon a civilised society by a criminal and barbaric class. Rather, he says, much of what they do reflect the widely shared set of materialistic and hedonistic values. This wider cultural stream represents the tide which threatens to overwhelm us and, therefore, ragamuffin and the urban poor's excesses are only symptoms of larger cultural crisis.
The next generation of political leaders must have the nuanced understanding of Jamaica's overarching crisis which Gray displays in this intellectual goldmine called Demeaned But Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com
